Clockwork Princess

Page 17

And then there was Gabriel. Cecily's thoughts where he was concerned were jumbled and confused. His eyes were bright, his body tense as a coiled spring as he leaned against his brother's armchair. On the dark velvet sofa just across from the Lightwoods sat Jem, with Tessa beside him. He had looked up as the door had opened and, as he always did, had seemed to glow a little brighter when he saw Will. It was a quality peculiar to both of them, and Cecily wondered if it was that way for all parabatai, or if they were a unique case. In either eventuality, it must be terrifying to be so intertwined with another person, especially when one of them was as fragile as Jem.
As she watched, Tessa laid her hand over Jem's and said something quiet to him that made him smile. Tessa looked quickly to Will, but he only crossed the room as he always did to lean against the fireplace mantel. Cecily had never been able to decide if he did this because he was perpetually cold or because he thought he looked dashing standing before the leaping flames.
You must be ashamed of your brother-harboring illicit feelings for his parabatai's fiancee, Will had said to her. If he had been anyone else, she would have told him there was no point keeping secrets. The truth would out, eventually. But in Will's case, she was not sure. He had the skill of years of hiding and pretending on his side. He was a master actor. If it were not that she was his sister, if it were not that she saw his face at the moments when Jem was not looking, she did not think she would have guessed it either.
And then there was the awful truth that he would not need to hide his secret forever. He needed to hide it only as long as Jem lived. If James Carstairs were not so unrelentingly kind and well intentioned, Cecily thought, she might have hated him on her brother's behalf. Not only was he marrying the girl Will loved, but when he himself died, she feared, Will would never recover. But you could not blame someone for dying. For leaving on purpose, perhaps, as her brother had left her and her parents, but not for dying, the power over which was surely beyond the grasp of any mortal human.
"I'm glad you're all here," Charlotte said in a strained voice that snapped Cecily out of her brown study. Charlotte was looking gravely down at a polished salver on her desk, on which was an opened letter and a small packet wrapped in waxed paper. "I have received a disturbing piece of correspondence. From the Magister."
"From Mortmain?" Tessa leaned forward, and the clockwork angel she always wore around her neck swung free, glittering in the light from the fire. "He wrote to you?"
"Not to inquire about your health, one presumes," said Will. "What does he want?"
Charlotte took a deep breath. "I will read you the letter."
My Dear Mrs. Branwell,
Forgive me for troubling you at what must be a distressing time for your household. I was grieved, though I must confess not shocked, to hear of Mr. Carstairs's grave indisposition.
I believe you are aware that I am the happy possessor of a large-I might say exclusively large-portion of the medicine that Mr. Carstairs requires for his continued well-being. Thus we find ourselves in a most interesting situation, which I am eager to resolve to the satisfaction of us both. I would be very glad to make an exchange: If you are willing to confide Miss Gray to my keeping, I will place a large portion of yin fen in yours.
I send a token of my goodwill. Pray let me know your decision by writing to me. If the correct sequence of numbers that are printed at the bottom of this letter, are spoken to my automaton, I am sure to receive it.
Yours sincerely,
Axel Mortmain
"That is all," Charlotte said, folding the letter in half and placing it back on the salver. "There are instructions on how to summon the automaton to which he wishes us to give our answer, and there are the number he speaks of, but they give no clue as to his location."
There was a shocked silence. Cecily, who had seated herself in a small flowered armchair, glanced at Will and saw him look away quickly as if to hide his expression. Jem paled, his face turning the color of old ash, and Tessa-Tessa sat very still, the light from the fire chasing shadows across her face.
"Mortmain wants me," she said finally, breaking the silence. "In exchange for Jem's yin fen."
"It is ridiculous," Jem said. "Untenable. The letter should be given to the Clave to see if they can discern anything about his location from it, but that is all."
"They will not be able to discern anything about his location from it," said Will quietly. "The Magister has proved himself over and over too clever for that."
"This is not clever," said Jem. "This is the crudest form of blackmail-"
"I do not disagree," said Will. "I say we take the packet as a blessing, a handful more of yin fen that will help you, and we ignore the rest."
"Mortmain wrote the letter about me," Tessa said, interrupting them both. "The decision should be mine." She angled her body toward Charlotte. "I will go."
There was another dead silence. Charlotte looked ashen; Cecily could feel her own hands slippery with sweat where they twisted in her lap. The Lightwood brothers seemed desperately uncomfortable. Gabriel looked as if he wished he were anywhere else but there. Cecily could hardly blame them. The tension between Will, Jem, and Tessa felt like a powder keg that needed only a match to blow it to kingdom come.
"No," Jem said finally, rising to his feet. "Tessa, you cannot."
She followed his motion, rising as well. "I can. You are my fiance. I cannot allow you to die when I might help you, and Mortmain does not mean me physical harm-"
"We do not know what he means! He cannot be trusted!" Will said suddenly, and then he put his head down, his hand gripping the mantel so hard that his fingers were white. Cecily could tell he was forcing himself to be silent.
"If it were you Mortmain wanted, Will, you would go," said Tessa, looking at Cecily's brother with a meaning in her eyes that brooked no contradiction. Will flinched at her words.
"No," said Jem. "I would forbid him as well."
Tessa turned to Jem with the first expression of anger toward him Cecily had ever seen on her face. "You cannot forbid me-any more than you could Will-"
"I can," Jem said. "For a very simple reason. The drug is not a cure, Tessa. It only extends my living. I will not allow you to throw away your own life for a remnant of mine. If you go to Mortmain, it will be for nothing. I still won't take the drug."
Will lifted his head. "James-"
But Tessa and Jem were staring at each other, eyes locked. "You would not," Tessa breathed. "You would not insult me by hurling a sacrifice I made for you back in my face like that."
Jem strode across the room and seized the packet-and the letter-off Charlotte's desk. "I would rather insult you than lose you," he said, and before any of them could make a move to stop him, he cast both items into the fire.
The room erupted in shouts. Henry dashed forward, but Will had already dropped to his knees before the grate and thrust both his hands into the flames.
Cecily bolted out of her chair. "Will!" she shouted, and darted over to her brother. She seized him by the shoulders of his jacket and pulled him away from the fire. He tumbled backward, the still-burning packet falling from his hands. Gideon was there a moment later, stamping out the small flames with his feet, leaving a mess of burned paper and silvery powder on the rug.
Cecily stared into the grate. The letter with the instructions telling how to summon Mortmain's automaton was gone, burned into ashes.
"Will," Jem said. He looked sick. He fell to his knees next to Cecily, still holding her brother's shoulders, and drew a stele from his jacket. Will's hands were scarlet, livid white where blisters were already forming on the skin, and patched black with soot. His breath was hitching and harsh in Cecily's ear-gasps of pain, the way he had sounded when he'd fallen off the roof of their house when he was nine and had shattered the bones in his left arm. "Byddwch yn iawn, Will," she said as Jem put the stele to her brother's forearm and drew quickly. "You'll be all right."
"Will," Jem said, half under his breath. "Will, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry. Will-"
Will's hitching breaths were slowing as the iratze took effect, his skin paling back to its normal color. "There's still some yin fen that can be preserved," Will said, slumping back against Cecily. He smelled like smoke and iron. She could feel his heart pounding through his back. "It had better be gathered up before anything else-"
"Here." It was Tessa, kneeling down; Cecily was dimly aware that all the others were standing, Charlotte with one hand over her mouth in shock. In Tessa's right hand was a handkerchief, in which was perhaps half a handful of yin fen, all that Will had saved from the fire. "Take this," she said, and put it in Jem's free hand, the one that did not hold the stele. He looked as if he were about to speak to her, but she had already straightened up. Looking utterly shattered, Jem watched as she walked from the room.
"Oh, Will. Whatever are we going to do with you?"
Will sat, feeling rather incongruous in the flowered armchair in the drawing room, letting Charlotte, perched on a small stool before him, smear salve on his hands. They no longer hurt much, after three iratzes, and they had returned to their normal color, but Charlotte insisted on treating them anyway.
The others had gone, save for Cecily and Jem; Cecily sat beside him, perched on the arm of his chair, and Jem knelt on the burned rug, his stele still in his hands, not touching Will but close. They had refused to leave, even after the others had drifted away and Charlotte had sent Henry back to the cellar to work. There was nothing more to be done, after all. The instructions on how to contact Mortmain were gone, burned to ash, and there was no more decision to be made.
Charlotte had insisted that Will stay and have his hands salved, and Cecily and Jem had refused to leave him. And Will had to admit he liked it, liked having his sister there on the arm of his chair, liked the fiercely protective glares she shot at anyone who came near him, even Charlotte, sweet and harmless with her salve and her motherly clucking. And Jem, at his feet, leaning a bit against his chair, as he had so many times when Will was being bandaged up from fights or iratzed because of wounds he'd gotten in battle.
"Do you remember the time Meliorn tried to knock your teeth out for calling him a pointy-eared layabout?" Jem said. He had taken some of the yin fen Mortmain had sent, and there was color in his cheeks again.
Will smiled, despite everything; he couldn't help it. It had been the one thing in the past few years that had made him feel fortunate: that he had someone in his life who knew him, knew what he was thinking before he said it out loud. "I would have knocked his teeth out in return," he said, "but when I went to find him again, he had emigrated to America. To avoid my wrath, no doubt."
"Hmph," said Charlotte, the way she always did when she thought Will was getting above himself. "He had many enemies in London, to my understanding."
"Dydw I ddim yn gwybod pwy yw unrhyw un o'r bobl yr ydych yn siarad amdano," said Cecily plaintively.
"You may not know who we are talking about, but no one else knows what you are saying," said Will, though his tone held no real reproof. He could hear the exhaustion in his own voice. The lack of sleep of the night before was taking its toll. "Speak English, Cecy."
Charlotte rose, returned to her desk, and set the jar of salve down. Cecily tugged on a lock of Will's hair. "Let me see your hands."
He held them up. He remembered the fire, the white-hot agony of it, and more than anything else Tessa's shocked face. He knew she would understand why he had done what he had done, why he had not thought twice about it, but the look in her eyes-as if her heart had broken for him.
He only wished that she were still here. It was good to be here with Jem and Cecily and Charlotte, to be surrounded by their affection, but without her there would always be something missing, a Tessa-shaped part chiseled out of his heart that he would never get back.
Cecily touched his fingers, which looked quite normal now, aside from the soot under his fingernails. "It is quite astonishing," she said, then patted his hands lightly, careful not to smear the salve. "Will has always been prone to damaging himself," she added, with fondness in her tone. "I cannot count the broken limbs he sustained when we were children-the scratches, the scars."
Jem leaned closer against the chair, staring into the fire. "Better it were my hands," he said.
Will shook his head. Exhaustion was muting the edges of everything in the room, blurring the flocked wallpaper into a single mass of dark color. "No. Not your hands. You need your hands for the violin. What do I need mine for?"
"I should have known what you would do," Jem said in a low voice. "I always know what you will do. I should have known you would put your hands into the fire."
"And I should have known you would throw that packet away," said Will, without rancor. "It was-it was a madly noble thing to do. I understand why you did it."
"I was thinking of Tessa." Jem drew his knees up and rested his chin on them, then laughed softly. "Madly noble. Isn't that meant to be your area of expertise? Suddenly I am the one who does ridiculous things and you tell me to stop?"
"God," said Will. "When did we change places?"
The firelight played over Jem's face and hair as he shook his head. "It is a very strange thing, to be in love," he said. "It changes you."
Will looked down at Jem, and what he felt, more than jealousy, more than anything else, was a wistful desire to commiserate with his best friend, to speak of the feelings he held in his heart. For were they not the same feelings? Did they not love the same way, the same person? But, "I wish you wouldn't risk yourself," was all he said.
Jem stood up. "I have always wished that about you."
Will raised his eyes, so drowsy with sleep and the tiredness that came with healing runes that he could see Jem only as a haloed figure of light. "Are you going?"
"Yes, to sleep." Jem touched his fingers lightly to Will's healing hands. "Let yourself rest, Will."
Will's eyes were already drifting closed, even as Jem turned to go. He did not hear the door close behind Jem. Somewhere down the corridor Bridget was singing, her voice rising above the crackle of the fire. Will did not find it as annoying as he usually did, but rather more like a lullaby that his mother would once have sung him, to guide him to sleep.